BOEING-BOEING
Sunday, March 21st, 2010
If laughter is indeed the best medicine, then there’s no better cure for the blues than a rollicking romp of a farce. British farces, like the recently reviewed See How They Run and No Sex Please, We’re British, have become a particular favorite of this reviewer. The word farce does come from the French, however, so it should come as no surprise that English masters of farce like Ray (Move Over, Mrs. Markham) Cooney have their Gallic counterparts, most notably the late Marc Camoletti, author of Boeing-Boeing and Don’t Dress For Dinner.
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SWEENEY TODD
Sunday, March 21st, 2010
Downsizing may be the best thing that’s ever happened to Stephen Sondeheim and Hugh Wheeler’s Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber Of Fleet Street. First came the 2004 London-to-New York transfer that had a cast of ten actor-musicians who not only performed the roles but became the show’s onstage orchestra. More true to its source material than that this “high-concept” revival was The Production Company’s brilliant 2009 downscaling (once again to ten actors) in North Hollywood’s 34-seat Chandler Studio Theatre. To this reviewer, at least, The ProdCo’s “Teeney Todd” felt more like the real thing than its West End-Broadway counterpart, and the same holds true with Cygnet Theatre Company’s superb eleven-actor midsized revival down in Old Town San Diego.
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WHISPER HOUSE
Sunday, January 31st, 2010
I present to you a story set upon a Northern shore. Denizens of lighthouse during times of war. The foolish things they did. The foolish things they said. I’m sure you would agree they would be better off dead.”
Singing these lyrics are a 1910s-garbed 2010-alternative-rock-performing pair of ghosts haunting a 1941 Maine lighthouse. The spectral vocalists, one male, one female, and their equally deceased backup band are the victims of a 1912 Halloween night shipwreck, unable even 29 years later to depart from the lighthouse whose keeper brought about their deaths through negligence. If only he had remembered to turn on the light that fateful night.
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LOST IN YONKERS
Sunday, January 31st, 2010
Back when Neil Simon started writing plays like Come Blow Your Horn and Barefoot In The Park for the Broadway stage, few could have imagined that the author of such lightweight fare would go on to one day be awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. Then came Brighton Beach Memoirs and the rest of the “Eugene Trilogy” and critics were forced to admit that Simon was a playwright of unique, remarkable gifts. His 1991 masterwork Lost In Yonkers impressed audiences and reviewers alike and from that play forward Simon would forever be referred to as Pulitzer Prize Winner Neil Simon.
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GLORIOUS!
Sunday, January 17th, 2010
“People may say I can’t sing, but no one can say I didn’t sing.”
–Florence Foster Jenkins (1868-1944)
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HOW THE GRINCH STOLE CHRISTMAS
Sunday, December 6th, 2009
The Grinch has been stealing Christmas for the past fifty-two years, ever since the now classic Dr. Seuss children’s book first hit the stands, yet who would have thought then that the curmudgeonly cave-dweller with a heart “two sizes too small” would go on to conquer the small screen (in a 1966 animated special featuring the voice of Boris Karloff as the Grinch), the big screen (Jim Carrey played the hairy Green One in 2000), and even Broadway (in musical theater form in 2006 and ’07)? Not even Dr. Seuss himself could have imagined such a future for his 1957 picture book.
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THE NEW CENTURY
Sunday, December 6th, 2009
Paul Rudnick fans will be in gay theater heaven for the month of December as the playwright’s latest comedy, The New Century, gets its West Coast Premiere at San Diego’s Diversionary Theatre in a terrific production under the able direction of Igor Goldin.
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BENT
Sunday, November 1st, 2009RECOMMENDED
With anti-gay violence spiraling throughout the world, the time seems apt indeed for Diversionary Theatre’s thirtieth-anniversary revival of Martin Sherman’s gut-wrenching Holocaust drama Bent. Though occasionally hampered by some problematic technical/design elements, this beautifully acted production is a powerful reminder of our not-so-distant past, and of the dangers of anti-gay bigotry gone amok.
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